Enemy Reconnaissance
Now that we’ve had a week to observe the rightie reaction to the election, it’s safe to say they’re not going to put up a cohesive counter-attack anytime soon. They may still not know what hit them in time for the 2010 midterms.
The extremists, which are most of the base, refuse to acknowledge they are in an ideological minority. They still think if they move further Right, tweak their fundraising infrastructures, find candidates with a little more charisma (e.g., Sarah Palin and clones thereof), and campaign even dirtier, they’ll make a comeback in the next election.
Gary Kamiya writes that the GOP’s only hope is to reinvent themselves as pragmatists, which is true, but they’re not going to do that. Kamiya says,
The right’s love affair with the feckless Palin indicates it has learned nothing from the Bush and McCain debacles. Bush’s presidency was a decisive refutation of the idea that Republicans can win by playing only to true believers. And McCain’s fateful decision to embrace the Bush-Rove play-to-the-base strategy cost him any chance he had at winning the election. …
… Some conservatives, like the National Review’s Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, have tepidly argued that the GOP must reach out to the middle class. But they don’t explain exactly how it’s supposed to do this without abandoning its core ideology. McCain made a classic Republican appeal to the “aspirational” middle class by attacking tax increases on the richest Americans, and he promoted a free-market approach to healthcare. But Americans roundly rejected both ideas. Lowry and Ponnuru blame McCain for being a bad salesman, but the real problem is the product.
Kamiya’s analysis is really good and worth reading all the way through. In a nutshell, the GOP’s “appeal to the base” approach is backfiring because the base is getting smaller and narrower. This base is increasingly out of sync with the nation’s political center.
Moderates rejected the GOP for two reasons: because Bush’s presidency was a disaster, and because they didn’t like the GOP’s harsh, ugly tone. That tone is the result of the fact that the party was taken over long ago by “movement conservatives,” true believers who bitterly oppose secular modernism and everything associated with it. Their hard-line Jacobinism, imbued with an inchoate sense of angry resentment, drives the right’s culture war and animates the movement’s base. It has become synonymous with modern conservatism, which is why McCain’s ugly campaign was no accident.
The problem is that moderates are completely turned off both by the GOP’s performance and by its extreme, demonizing worldview and rhetoric. And the reason they’re turned off is that the country’s demographics have fundamentally changed — and changed in a way that makes it impossible for the GOP in its current form to survive.
In his column today, David Brooks divides the party into Traditionalists (i.e., barking mad whackjobs and the low-information voters who believe them) and Reformists (i.e., party “elites” like Brooks who for years lived under the delusion they were speaking for movement conservatism, when in fact they were serving only as the respectable facade, while the base only cared what Limbaugh, Coulter and Hannity said). Brooks says,
The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
They are going to win, first, because Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists. Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone. Among the remaining members, the popular view is that Republicans have been losing because they haven’t been conservative enough.
Second, Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms. The reformists, on the other hand, have no institutions.
FYI, the “reformists” are mostly pundits employed in mainstream media (like the New York Times).
Now Brooks has a moment of clarity:
Finally, Traditionalists own the conservative mythology. Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.
This narrative happens to be mostly bogus at this point. Most professional conservatives are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists. Their supposed heroism consists of living inside the large conservative cocoon and telling each other things they already agree with. But this embattled-movement mythology provides a rationale for crushing dissent, purging deviationists and enforcing doctrinal purity. It has allowed the old leaders to define who is a true conservative and who is not. It has enabled them to maintain control of (an ever more rigid) movement.
In other words, they are destroying themselves from the inside, strangling themselves with their own ever shrinking and ever more inflexible movement.
